1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to the field of computer systems. More particularly, embodiments of the present invention relate to a method and system for flexible creation and publication of electronic forms.
2. Background Art
With increasing use of electronic negotiations and transactions, many organizations have requirements to publish summary information concerning negotiations to a third party system as well as other internal and external systems. For example, public sector entities have numerous rules and regulations that guide their purchasing processes from building and maintaining roads to maintaining parks. Other examples requiring publishing summary information include European Union's requirement to publish all negotiations over a certain threshold on the Tenders Electronic Daily (TED), or the U.S. Federal government's requirement to publish all negotiations over $25,000 on the website, FedBizOpps.gov. One of the reasons for regulations like the ones mentioned above is to ensure that funds are not being spent unwisely or unethically as well as to allow suppliers and vendors equal opportunity to participate in such transactions, which in turn creates competition and lowers costs.
In order to meet these requirements, public sector entities need to publish their procurement of request for quotations (RFQ), auction, tender, solicitation or the like on their external websites. To comply with these requirements, organizations manually print the forms, manually enter the information and transmit via facsimile the form to the agency requiring the form. The agency then publishes the form on centrally administered electronic bulletin boards. Furthermore, the agency had to manually enter and maintain the information, to display it on their external facing web sites such that suppliers could view all ongoing procurement activities.
Unfortunately this manual process is a tedious process and prone to error. Furthermore, this manual process is costly to implement because of its need for a workforce to carryout the manual process described. Additionally, current software programs for this process are unique for each organization and need to be modified for each organization according to each organization's particular format requirement.